The sound of 4 tubes in your DAW – FreqTube FT1 in the test

Beat Redaktion on 27.02.2025 at 10:43 am

The sound of analog tubes, especially their harmonic distortion, is probably one of the most common reasons why analog outboard equipment can still be found in many studios. On the other hand, good analog effects are also expensive and digital plug-ins are getting closer and closer in terms of sound. Freqport wants to combine the best of both worlds with FreqTube FT1 .

FreqTube offers you four analog tubes in a compact and robust desktop housing. The connection to the computer is made with a single USB-C cable, which can be used to provide up to four tracks in the DAW with real analog tube sound.

*FreqTube offers you four analog tubes in a compact and robust desktop housing and aims to combine the best of analog gear and digital DAW.*

After connecting the external power supply, the tubes are illuminated in a stylish orange. This not only looks good, but is also practical in use. This way you can see straight away which of the tubes are in use and which are not. Two pairs of tubes are installed: a modern ECC83/12AX7 variant is intended for more powerful distortion, while the ECC81/12AT7 sound a little more subtle and are also suitable for the master bus.

All tubes can be used in parallel. This makes it possible to send both the kick and the snare as mono tracks with different settings through the E83CC, while the master channel is processed in stereo by the two 12AT7s. The only thing that the different tubes cannot be mixed with each other.

Easy integration via plug-in

The installation was surprisingly straightforward: download and install the software from the manufacturer’s website, connect FreqTube to the computer via USB-C and load the plug-in into the DAW, that’s it. In the test, the setup ran smoothly in parallel to the sound card, which is a given under Windows. However, additional latency must be planned for (around 75 ms on our Windows computer), which rules out using it directly during recording.

The large color display shows the assignment of the hardware’s 8 controls. It takes the track name and the color of the track from the DAW, which makes things easier to understand, especially when using multiple instances. If you have a tube each on kick, snare, guitar and bassline, you can freely decide how the controls should be assigned. You can assign drive from all three instances to the controls, as well as the filter frequency for the bassline and the harmonics of the guitar track. Since these are normal controls and not endless encoders, you first have to pick up the respective parameter value by turning the control when changing the plug-in.

Digital multimode filters

In addition to drive, you can also control the harmonics of the selected tubes, which is visualized graphically. Headroom and input gain can also be adjusted. There are also two multimode filters. The first of these digital filters only processes the dry signal. This is useful if you mix in the tube sound using the dry/wet control and want to filter the original signal to avoid overlaps. With the second filter, you adjust the distorted signal and tame the overtones, clean up the bass range or boost certain frequency ranges. We would of course have preferred an analog filter here, but that would have increased the price even further.

Hardware vs. Software

All parameters can be automated directly in the DAW, which is another advantage of plug-in integration, in addition to total recall and the elimination of up to 8 audio cables compared to analog routing. There are still the disadvantages of higher price and latency compared to pure software emulations, which FreqTube would have to compensate for with better sound. Since the digitally emulated tubes in the plug-ins from renowned manufacturers such as Universal Audio or Softube already sound very realistic, you shouldn’t expect an extreme improvement. In a blind comparison, however, we chose
FreqTube FT1 as the best-sounding effect in 9 out of 10 cases.

Conclusion

With FreqTube you can integrate analog tubes into the DAW on up to four channels and all you need is a USB cable. The integration as a plug-in is straightforward and ran stably in the test, the equipment with various tubes and additional filters is a practical solution and there is also an audible added value in terms of sound compared to plug-ins, depending on the area of application. The differences are not serious and are mainly evident in the extreme areas such as subtle saturation of the master channel or strong distortion with the drive turned up to full. Here the hardware sounds more open and detailed to our ears and overall more rounded and pleasant.

You can find the FreqTube FT1 at Thomann here .